Morgan Stanley will buy 13 hotels from Japanese airline All Nippon Airways for an estimated 280 billion yen ($2.4 billion), financial sources said on Friday.
The deal is set to be one of the biggest single-asset property transactions in Asia and comes amid increasingly fierce competition for commercial property in Japan.
The book value of the hotels, all of which are in Japan, is around 150 billion yen, resulting in an extraordinary profit of around 130 billion yen for ANA.
ANA plans to use some of the funds to buy new planes, the sources said.
ANA said in a statement that it plans to hold a board meeting on Friday and that its hotels are an item on the agenda for discussion. The deals follows the $1.7 billion yen sale of the office portion of the Pacific Century Place Marunouchi building in central Tokyo last year by Hong
Kong tycoon Richard Li to K.K. daVinci Advisors, Japan's biggest real estate fund.